


All She Was Could Have Been Me

by nothing_rhymes_with_ianto



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-04
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-20 06:52:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/582518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothing_rhymes_with_ianto/pseuds/nothing_rhymes_with_ianto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto could have been a chosen one, too, if he hadn't been forced to grow up</p>
            </blockquote>





	All She Was Could Have Been Me

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the "fairytales" square of angst_bingo. Sort of an extended version of the "garden" prompt I wrote for 300 drabbles.

“I knew about them, you know?”

“Knew about what?”

“The faeries.” Ianto says quietly when he sits down in the chair in Jack’s office. “I knew about them, from when I was a kid.”

“What do you mean?” Jack sits forward in his own seat.

“When I was a kid, our estate had a little field behind it with a bunch of little trees. It was just some lot that hadn’t been built on yet, but I was a kid, so I thought it was the most amazing forest fantasy land ever. I used to play there all the time. I remember I thought the trees were talking to me. Sometimes I talked back.”

“The faeries.”

Ianto remembers swaying, curling leaves and song-like voices, merry like little children. He remembers the way the trees had bent to meet him when he wanted to climb, or how flowers and plants would grow when he wanted to see them, how the sun would come out if he was bored and wanted to play. He remembers laughter and voices he thought were his friends.

“Yeah. They wanted me to go with them, once. I think they wanted to choose me. So they asked. But my mum was sick and my dad wasn’t taking it well so I said no.”

“Always the practical one.”

Ianto shrugs and thinks back on the bleakness of that time. “I guess. But I stayed and played with them and I guess they thought they’d try again later.” Ianto sighs and scratches his eyebrow. “But then my mum got better, and my father noticed that I was daydreaming a lot. He wanted me to be a man so he signed me up for rugby and things and all my time was taken up by that and schoolwork. And then I got kicked off the rugby team.”

“What does that have to do with the faeries?”

“I guess by the time I got back out there again, my dad had beaten most of the imagination out of me. I played for a while but the trees didn’t talk to me as much as they used to. And then someone decided to build on the lot. I remember waking up to the sound of bulldozers and machinery. I ran out into the field because I thought I could do something. I managed to rescue a little sapling and planted it in someone else’s yard and I guess they didn’t care because it stayed there. I visited the garden all the time and thought the tree was thanking me and talking to me. Then I turned twelve and my mum, well, things just went to shit and I never went back there.”

“You were a chosen one,” Jack leans back, crossing his arms over his chest. He sighs heavily. “I guess it’s a good thing you didn’t come with us then. They might have tried to take you even if you are an adult, just out of annoyance or spite.”

“Sometimes I wish I had gone with them.”

“Why? You would have slowly turned into one of them.”

“But I’d have eternal childhood. I would have been innocent forever. I lost my childhood too young, Jack. I was seven when things started to go wrong and I had to take care of my mum while dad was at work and my sister was at school. I taught myself until I was nine.”

Ianto recalls long hours in the dim light of the kitchen, one eye on his studies and the other on his mum as she talked to herself and scribbled nonsense into a notebook. He’d been a morbid child before then, a loner, a little kid with dark interests and bad habits, and they’d only gotten worse after his mum finally succumbed to her own dark mind and he was stuck in the house and burdened with her care. He grew up too fast then, in the darkness of their little flat. A childhood marred by mental illness and faeries, grown to an adulthood with too much loss and cynicism and not enough faith to get out of the rut of Torchwood.

“Your records said you went to school, though.” Jack comments, jarring Ianto out of his thoughts.

“They only let me into primary school when I tested at a higher level than I should have been for my age. I never got to be a kid. If I’d gone with the faeries, at least maybe I’d have retained my innocence and childhood. Maybe I wouldn’t have turned out like this.”


End file.
